Shohini Ghose (MIT Press)
IT IS perhaps natural, when reading Her Space, Her Time: How trailblazing women scientists decoded the hidden universe, to make comparisons with Hidden Figures. After all, the book’s marketing makes it clear that it was influenced by Margot Lee Shetterly’s acclaimed account of Black women at NASA during the space race. And yes, it leans on a similar metaphor, speaking of “invisible stars here on Earth” who shed light on the unseen cosmos.
But Her Space, Her Time – by , a quantum physicist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada – treads new ground and is wider in scope than its forebear. Each chapter focuses on an area of physics or astronomy to which women made huge, underappreciated contributions: radioactivity, the big bang theory and parity violation, to name just a few. Some of those included have a degree of fame, such as Henrietta Leavitt, whose work lets us measure the distance of celestial objects. Others are barely known, such as Bibha Chowdhuri, a pioneer of cosmic ray research.
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And some are sadly nameless. One chapter focuses on Mary Golda Ross, the first Native American woman to hold an advanced mathematics degree. Ross’s talents were crucial to the development of the Agena rocket, which came to be one of the most flown rockets in the world. But here, we also learn about the Navajo women at the heart of the electronics revolution. The firm Fairchild Semiconductor built a plant in Shiprock, New Mexico, in 1965, employing hundreds of Navajo people, mainly women, to handle the complex components that would be used in NASA’s space programme. They developed techniques that lowered the failure rate of chips to less than 5 per cent, a quarter of that of any other factory, but they were paid less than minimum wage.
It is moving to see the connections between women. We learn that much of the early funding for astronomy in North America came from women, such as Mary Anna Draper, whose money enabled researchers at Harvard College Observatory in the late 19th century to create a comprehensive record of thousands of stars.
This work was underpinned by the calculations of women like Annie Jump Cannon and Williamina Fleming. Working with the observatory’s director, Edward Pickering, Cannon reconciled two systems of stellar classification (one spearheaded by Fleming, the other by Draper’s niece, Antonia Maury) to form the Harvard Classification Scheme. Setting out the star classes O, B, A, F, G, K and M, this was first published in 1901. The astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin showed in 1925 that this sequence decreases in temperature.
The long road to the Harvard Classification Scheme typifies how women scientists have bridged chasms of misogyny through their intellect and collaborative spirit, but it also reveals how deep those fissures run. Soon after the scheme was published, a mnemonic to remember the sequence emerged: “Oh, Be a Fine Girl, Kiss Me!” As Ghose puts it, “a brilliant scientific achievement by a woman, building on two decades of work by women, most of it funded by women, turned into a ridiculous request to all women”. The phrase is still in some textbooks today.
Just as women astronomers have been refused authorship, awards and prestigious academic positions in life, they have also often been denied the typical honours afforded to leading researchers in death, such as having cosmic phenomena named after them.
Ghose reminds us that the cheapening of women scientists’ achievements (or their misattribution to men) has come to be known as the Matilda effect, after 19th-century suffragist Matilda Gage, who first drew attention to it – a rare case of a woman getting her due.
This is just one strand of a rich history Ghose has assembled. She walks a difficult tightrope, deftly explaining tricky concepts while providing enough detail to keep experts entertained. The book is almost always interesting, and the few drier patches are livened up by her pointed asides, in which she lets her disdain for misogyny past and present shine through. When recalling her amazement at the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2021, Ghose wonders “what Henrietta Leavitt would have wanted to observe using this incredible new telescope. I also wonder why the telescope does not carry her name.”
So yes, it is clear that Her Space, Her Time is part of a lineage of books like Hidden Figures – important, often thankless works that don’t always make household names of their subjects. But just as women like Cannon conducted research that other women built on, so, too, has Her Space, Her Time made an important contribution to this chain of histories, one that will no doubt lead to a clearer view of the science that lit up our universe.
